Creative futures for cultural heritage: a typology of creative practice in the GLAM sector – towards a creative heritage approach

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to develop a non-prescriptive typology of creative practice and its role in GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutions through an examination of published research. Highlighting key issues and perspectives on integration and intent in each approach it examines practice through five categories: (1) demonstration; (2) programmed performance; (3) historically informed creativity and performance; (4) institutional preservation of creativity; and, (5) creative heritage. The first four categories subsume creativity as reproduction, in the pursuit of claims to originality or use GLAM spaces as a simple stage or backdrop. Creative heritage, on the other hand, is characterised by the use of creativity as an integrated practice that intentionally produces integrated and authentic outcomes allied to the repertoire and work of GLAM institutions. We conclude with suggestions about how creative innovation offers opportunities for institutions to meet and enhance strategic priorities and overcome challenges to sustainability relative to a wider cultural economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative practice
• creative heritage
• museums
• galleries
• libraries
• archives

Introduction

The prompting and preservation of creativity and creative practice by collecting institutions has long been an area of tension, where the practicalities, possibilities, and the ethical nature of preservation practices are under question. These issues have recently been highlighted in public forums regarding two instances of celebrities using cultural heritage items which saw experts and the greater public questioning the repurposing of objects in historical collections. The first occurred at the Met Gala in May 2022, when Kim Kardashian wore a dress originally made famous by Marilyn Monroe as she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1962. Loaned from the collection of ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’, Kardashian’s actions were met largely with outrage concerning damage to the dress. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) issued a statement which included the rebuke, ‘historic garments should not be worn by anybody, public or private figures’ (ICOM Committee for Museums and Collection of Costume, Fashion and Textiles 2022). The second contrasting instance occurred months later, when popular culture icon Lizzo was invited to peruse and play flutes from The Library of Congress collection. Lizzo later played a 200-year-old crystal flute from the collection in concert; significantly, the flute once belonged to slaveholder and former US president James Madison. One key difference between the Monroe dress and the Madison flute was their conservation: the dress is highly fragile and of material value, its make of silk a fabric which no longer exists, while the flute is more robust, repairable, and of functional value, despite its age (see Scarborough 2022). While traditional ideals of preservation suggest creative artefacts should remain untouched, exhibited behind glass in temperature-controlled rooms, these recent controversies highlight a liberation of artefacts in ways that challenge strict notions of preservation, in turn signalling the creative potential of the collection so liberated. From this starting point, this article queries how creativity and creative practice might be best drawn upon in an institutional setting in order to energise the ‘resonance and wonder’ (Greenblatt 1990) of collections, revive community stories, increase the flexibility and sustainability of cultural heritage and make new meanings.

The collecting institutions to which we refer here are characterised broadly as the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector. While each institutional type has distinct traditions and professional practices (Hilder and Kennan 2020), in this article we take as our starting point that GLAM is a ‘common practice field’ (Rydbeck, Larsen, and Rasmussen 2023, 231) in as much as they share four significant socio-cultural roles: (1) ‘they are memory institutions guarding our collective and public memory, our cultural heritage’; (2) ‘they provide knowledge and cultural expressions to large sections of the population’; (3) they are ‘agents of popular enlightenment’; and (4) ‘they have a role as local meeting places and arenas of participation in public space’ (Audunson et al. 2020, 5–6). These roles are often reduced to a functional ‘display and storytelling’ and a mission aimed at expanding collections (Commonwealth of Australia 2023, 75). As such, the GLAM sector and definitions of its societal contribution is set aside from creativity, a concept that is increasingly used to describe the competitive advantage afforded by innovation, originality or ingenuity in any manner of professional or industrial conditions (Cerisola 2019). Early definitions of ‘creative industries’ excluded collecting institutions (Dalle Nogare and Murzyn-Kupisz 2021), emphatic that the GLAM sector was a more conservative public-service ‘cultural industry’, highlighting an idea that the action of preservation and exhibition was distinct from innovation and commercial reward. While some definitions of the creative industries evolved to include heritage institutions, it remains the case that where creativity intersects with the GLAM sector it continues to be ill-defined; the preservation and management of cultural heritage itself is not deemed a creative practice, while at the same time, tangible and intangible forms of creative practice may be the very thing being preserved. Conceptually and practically, it is broadly recognised there is a need for new approaches to practice, preservation, and presentation in order for the sector to reclaim the public imagination and underscore the roles GLAM institutions play as exciting and novel (Dalle Nogare and Murzyn-Kupisz 2021). By way of a review of recent scholarship articulating ways in which creativity emerges in the sector, in this article we argue that a greater integration of creative practice could assist in this mission.

In proceeding, we recognise the conceptual elasticity of the term creativity and its association with a wide array of practices across sectors, professions and skills – from writing and dancing, to painting and music making. Mindful of this range, we take a cue from the burgeoning scholarship that foregrounds another ‘common practice field’ defined in the central quality of the cultural industries – that is, the creative labour that distinguishes its objectives from other activities. Indicative is the work of Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011, 9) who reflect on the division of labour involved in the ‘symbol-making’ of cultural work in which ‘primary creative personnel such as writers, actors, directors, musicians’ (our emphasis) are distinguished from craftworkers and technicians, creative managers, administrators, executives and other ‘unskilled’ labourers. This grouping is distinguished here too from the ‘very broad and amorphous category’ labelled ‘knowledge workers’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011, 9, 58), one often used to encompass GLAM professionals (see e.g., Bicknell 2017; 2021). Nonetheless, while GLAM’s core business has been excluded from the creative industries, some existing activities, such as curation and exhibition design, might be seen as inherently creative (Khan and Bhatt 2019), just as the management and strategic direction for GLAM institutions might also be seen as an activity adjacent to the primary creative work associated with the arts, media and so on (Janes and Sandell 2007; Norris and Tisdale 2016). Certainly, collections that assist us to reflect on the past have often been a source of inspiration for creativity, where the concept of the archive – broadly speaking – represents fragments of artistic, cultural, and social histories ready to be ‘accorded significance’ (Featherstone 2006, 594), ripe not only for informing creative techniques, but as the basis for originating new works altogether, across various art forms (see for example, Borggreen and Gade 2013; Britt and Stephen-Cran 2015). The ‘use’ of artefacts, a term commonly peppered in the strategic plans of GLAM institutions, is rarely defined in relation to their creative possibilities. Hamilton and Saunderson (2017, 68) note that in such a context ‘“using” means observing, consulting, noting, and sketching’. Yet, to go beyond functional notions of use is to transcend a sense of preservation into the potential transmutation of the ontology of artefacts and archival material as ‘inert’ into something new, becoming and living (Haldrup and Bærenholdt 2015; Hall 2001; Smith 2011). We suggest, then, that a purposeful integration of creativity in the work of cultural heritage collection and exhibition can transform ‘use’ in ways that potentially also ‘grow’ the collection, audiences, and sustainable heritage practices.

This article focuses on modes of ‘creative practice’ which we understand to be synonymous with processes and products across a range of cultural forms, differing from the broader definition of creativity in the generative ways in which it engages with artisans in non-commercial contexts. In particular we use as a starting point the definition provided by Candy and Edmonds (2018, 64) which notes the term ‘creative practice’: (1) ‘combines the act of creating something novel with the necessary processes and techniques belonging to a given field of endeavour’; (2) ‘involves [a person/people] conceiving ideas and realis[ing] them in some form as artefacts, installations, compositions, designs or performances’; and (3) ‘is not only characterised by a focus on creating something new, but also by the way that the making process itself leads to a transformation in ideas, which in turn leads to new works’. In particular, our consideration of creative practice in the GLAM sector distinguishes its integration within preservation and exhibition practices from arts-based programming that might accompany exhibitions or seasonal themes (e.g., after-hours concerts, educational programmes, or public health interventions). In particular, this article seeks to highlight the tensions and perceived benefits of adopting creative practice-based strategies in GLAM institutions in order to ‘activate’ cultural heritage (Tsilemanis 2020), drawing inspiration and stories from the archives into the present, working to alleviate the notion of heritage as ‘static’ (Turnpenny 2004). This article first explores the ways in which creativity is currently conceptualised and realised by way of the presentation of a typology of creative practice in GLAM. Following this, a case is made for the increased uptake of ‘creative heritage’ – the last category in the typology – which describes a form of generative practice in the GLAM sector incorporating communities, institutions, and tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage for the purposes of interpretation and collection.

Method

It has been noted that ‘creativity’ has attained a currency and ubiquity to label a variety of activities in businesses, institutions and practices beyond the cultural sector (Bilton and Leary 2002, 49). Consequently, the prodigious deployment and ‘corruption of meaning’ (Bilton and Leary 2002, 49) of the word presents some challenges in surveying studies of its use to describe application and innovation in GLAM institutions. In studies of such contexts creativity might be deployed to characterise operational planning or recruitment processes as much as innovative engagements with collections. This understanding of problems of definition has thus informed our approach to gathering literature. We have not sought to exhaustively document quantitative patterns but search for indicative, qualitative case studies and to identify in them discursive and meaningful elaborations of creative practice as a specialised domain of symbolic production and imaginative engagement with GLAM resources, spaces and audiences. To develop the typology of creative practice, the authors first set out to identify published research that articulates a relationship between creative practice and cultural heritage activities in GLAM institutions. Of particular interest in the literature search were scholarly works that considered aspects of creativity related to exhibition, preservation and application and distinct from processes of programming. The authors were concerned with sources that: (1) approached creativity or creative practice in relation to traditional exhibition components; (2) considered the integration of creative practice alongside preservationist principles; and (3) highlighted the perceived value or benefit for key stakeholders in the application of creative practices in GLAM spaces, including for institutions, audiences, and artists. To locate literature pertaining to one or more of those three key aspects, [the first-named author] used Google Scholar, Scopus, and university library databases to identify potential sources. Key search terms included creativity, creative/artistic practice, gallery, library, museum, archive, dance, music, theatre, fine art, design, performance, immersive, exhibition, preservation, and arts-based methods. Sources were then grouped according to type of institution (gallery, library, archive or museum) and type of creativity (e.g., dance, theatre, music), with the search also capturing sources that discussed creativity in GLAM more generally. [The first-named author] then did a full review of the sources, grouping them thematically into the different types of creative practice they represented. From this grouping activity, five categories of creative practice were determined. The sources attached to each category were then reviewed by [the second and third-named authors], and additional literature searches were conducted by them to determine if any significant sources had been missed in the initial literature search. New keywords were added during this audit stage to expand the creative forms and preservationist activities captured, including drama, animation, curation, demonstration, installation, and re-enactment. It must be emphasised that the process outlined here was not intended to satisfy the criteria of a systematic literature review (Linnenluecke, Marrone, and Singh 2020), hence the absence of a PRISMA flow diagram and table of sources (Page, Moher, and McKenzie 2022), but rather provided a structured method for searching for sources and working through the literature so as to gain a broad understanding of how creative practice has been utilised in the GLAM sector.

The literature captured in the review process and discussed below included examples of creative practice in GLAM institutions in geographically distant and culturally distinct places including England, Belgium, Iceland, United States of America, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Australia, Zimbabwe and India. The review revealed instances of creative practice in art galleries (Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp), libraries (Reykjavik City Library), archives (International Animated Film Society Hollywood Animation Archive, National Film Archive of India) and museums (Mutare Museum, Macleay Museum at University of Sydney, Museum of Wellington City and Sea, Ceceilia Plantation, Polidore Plantation, Jacobs Plantation), as well as arts and cultural centres (Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute). Among these, the domains of creative practice highlighted were music, song, dance, ceremonial performance, time-based media, performance art, creative writing, theatre, narrative performance, animation, photography, and film. This article therefore highlights the extent to which creative practice is widespread – both geographically and across the different areas of the sector – as well as varied in terms of the types of creative practice being drawn on by GLAM institutions. While the importance and implications of cultural differences between sites and cultures merit attention, in this article we view these through a unifying lens as a ‘common practice field’ (Rydbeck, Larsen, and Rasmussen 2023, 231), with GLAM institutions involved in global heritage processes inflected by the transnational force of what Smith (2015) labels a Eurocentric ‘authorised heritage discourse’.

Categories of creativity in GLAM

We propose five categories that serve to delineate types of creative practice most commonly described in the reviewed literature as occurring in GLAM. These are: (1) demonstration; (2) programmed performance; (3) historically informed creativity and performance; (4) institutional preservation of creativity; and, (5) creative heritage. These categories, though not mutually exclusive, allow for an examination of creative applications across GLAM institutions, and highlight key issues and perspectives on integration and intent of such practices.

1. Demonstration

A logical integration of creative practice in the exhibition space is through real-time or pre-recorded demonstration. In this context, originality or innovation in creative practice is likely subsumed to foreground historically accurate approaches to cultural heritage, such that demonstrations perform or present a process, or particular use of material. Whether these are produced by artists or otherwise, heritage practices are channelled through a performance of sorts, in which static displays become something ‘in process’ and experienced in the moment. Clear examples of the integration of creativity and cultural heritage demonstration were found in two pieces of scholarship. Chipangura’s research (2020) sought to reinterpret a collection of drums in the Mutare Museum. In Zimbabwe’s colonial period, the playing of these drums was prohibited by colonial powers and their curation within the Beit Gallery section of the museum conveyed a sense of ‘othering’ of their indigenous custodians (2020, 433). The renewal of this exhibit was conceived as an intervention through outreach and co-curation which brought in ‘alternative community epistemologies and ontologies which were absent in the old museum display’ (2020, 438). The drums are heard within newly made audio and video recordings of their ritual use, reconnecting their physical form with the cultural and spiritual values they have for their users. This pre-recorded demonstration of heritage can assist visitors in realising a continuum of creative practice recreated in the moment of viewing.

In Australian First Nations artist Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula’s Makarr-garma exhibition in the Macleay Museum (now Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney, Australia), audiences were invited to experience a day in which a group of Yolgnu prepare for a ceremony; the ‘ceremony ground’ was a central part of the exhibition and doubled as a performance space, where live presentations of the ceremony would take place. Alongside historical artefacts, the performance included dance, movement, and song (manikay), through which Gumbula ‘demonstrated links between the material exhibition and intangible forms of Yolngu knowledge’ (Conway 2018, 126). The exhibition was temporally situated to reflect the times of day when songs and ceremony acts would occur, integrated with behaviours of animals and people. Both case studies exemplify the ways in which the aspiration for authenticity in demonstration might be rightly achieved through the involvement of specific communities and specialised cultural knowledge and intangible heritage. In Gumbula’s case, this came in the form of an expression of personal memory. As such, both cases also form part of the greater movement to decolonise GLAM institutions by removing the colonial lens applied to exhibition materials and spaces that delimits and authorises particular interpretations. Demonstration of the appropriate use of cultural and creative practice tools in a way that aligns with the values and customs of those groups with whose heritage they are associated can be seen as part of the process of ‘dismantling’ Western approaches to archives and exhibitions within decolonising activities (Tsatas 2022, 48).

(2)	Programmed Performance

Whereas the ‘demonstration’ category seeks to employ a baseline level of creativity to show the function of particular tools or practices in real time, ‘programmed performance’ extends this temporal quality and refers to artistic pieces in GLAM spaces in their own right. Performances are characterised as akin to ‘installations’ in that they can be viewed separately from exhibitions. The content of programmed performances is largely divorced from heritage-based antecedents, and can instead be drawn upon as a form of active preservation (Bishop 2014; Lista 2014) or as an effort to enhance the experience of museum spaces (Murgatroyd 2011). Bishop (2014) and Lista (2014) both describe dance and choreography as resistant to traditional archival processes – as with music, basic tools and notation cannot fully realise the intangible creative practice that is experienced in its purest form within performance. In examining dance within curatorial contexts, Brannigan (2015, 15) highlights that beyond movement scores, it is the body itself that acts as an archive, and it is this embodiment which eludes preservation. Through a study of Tate Modern (London), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York) and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Bishop (2014) reflects on historical attempts to integrate dance into the museum. Of note is the shift from dance installations outside of exhibition halls, for example, in garden spaces at MoMA in the 1970s, to more recently the sacralised indoor spaces, including the atrium and the gallery itself. Despite this trajectory, Bishop observes the failure of various attempts at the integration of dance into heritage spaces to achieve their artistic outcomes, declaring, ‘dance animates the galleries of the museum, but ultimately the museum flattens and homogenises our experience of dance’ (2014, 66).

The spatial aspects of museums are identified as particularly problematic in terms of facilitating physical performance and acoustics, an analysis common to scholarship by Lista (2014), Murgatroyd (2011) and Brannigan (2015). Lista, like Bishop, takes a retrospective approach to understanding how the curation of dance can alter visitors’ temporal experience of exhibitions. Dance here is also seen as a standalone feature, and as something which does not necessarily draw on aspects of heritage in its creation or performance, but is closer instead to contemporary performance art. In Murgatroyd’s (2011) study of a collaboration between a New Zealand Dance company and the Museum of Wellington City and Sea, the same conceptualisation of dance as a creative presentation, with little direct links to heritage material and collections, is employed. A point of difference is the focus on the impact on museum visitors who, despite the intentions of the dance company, did not see a connection between the performance and the museum or its exhibitions. Nonetheless, Murgatroyd describes the performance as having indirectly positive aspects for visitors and benefiting both the museum and dance company, financially and practically (2011).

(3)	Historically informed creativity and performance

The use of creative arts to ‘bring to life’ certain historical narratives, particularly via theatre or other forms of re-enactment (e.g., historic battles, mediaeval fairs) is commonly experienced alongside displays or collections of heritage. While not often the subject of scholarship, some concerted effort has gone into conceptualising this kind of heritage performance, often referred to as ‘museum theatre’, as can be found in the essays collected by Jackson and Kidd (2011a). Rather than demonstration of process, as described in Category 1, examples of historically informed creativity and performance bring elements of authentic history or heritage into creative formats most often drawing on dramaturgical performance both within and outside of GLAM institutions. In this way, such formats have often been co-opted as pedagogical tools, the critique of which sometimes lands re-enactment with the pejorative label of ‘edu-tainment’. Yet as Jackson and Kidd argue, heritage performance of this sort can be employed both in the interpretation and interrogation of heritage (2011b, 1). Essays within Jackson and Kidd’s collection exemplify the diverse motivations, applications and outcomes of museum theatre, where notions of performance collide with heritage, identity, cultures, and interpretation. Some chapters, such as that by Marilena Alivizatou (2011), evidence the ease with which museum theatre can overlap with elements of intangible heritage demonstration, such as through cultural dance within the framework of theatre performance. Their fieldwork at Te Papa in New Zealand and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre raises questions about authenticity, Indigenous agency, and the colonial structure of the museum.

More recent scholarship that interrogates heritage through performance is framed as ‘memory work’, for example by Benjamin and Alderman (2018) who review the use of museum theatre at three plantation museums in North Carolina (United States): Cecilia Plantation, Polidore Place Plantation, and Jacobs Plantation. The work in question, titled ‘Been Here So Long’, draws on oral history interviews with former slaves in the 1930s, re-presented as dramatic live performances by black theatre actors. This research gestures toward the concerns of this paper as the authors note the lack of attention to the ‘supply side’ (2018, 271) of the creation of theatre in such spaces, raising questions about the motives, experiences and challenges specific to programming dealing with slavery. The authors’ research sought to unpick the challenges for producers and museum managers of integrating slave voices in a plantation history setting, the education and touristic value of the show, and the handling of visitor’s interpretation. It became clear that the use of the medium was highly impactful in providing a realistic exchange of information for visitors, particularly with regard to traumas experienced in this era.

(4)	Institutional preservation of creativity

This category reflects the tensions involved in capturing, preserving, and curating creative practice particularly when performance-based art forms intersect with preservation activities. Literature suggests this intersection presents concerns for artists and audiences, focussed on issues of authenticity, and the kinds of narratives that can be produced in exhibition formats, or archival shelves. In the case of music in museums, for instance, challenges are observed around the inclusion of sound in GLAM spaces that prioritise object-based display (see Baker, Istvandity, and Nowak 2019). Traditional preservation and curation concepts can become unstuck when applied to creative practice and performance-based art with observations that the re-presentation of tools or products of creativity is not straightforward, particularly in terms of the impact perceived by visitors. Lawson, Finbow and Marçal (2019, 114) provide an overview of recent strategy development at Tate Modern for the conservation of time-based media and performance art in light of these issues, noting the ‘oscillation between being and active and dormant’ is what separates performance art from other genres. The resistance of this kind of creativity to archiving is noted, where the authors argue documentation may ‘be pivotal to the continued existence and future activation … of performance-based art-works’ (116). The documentation endorsed by Tate Modern included various templates such as a Performance Specification (to capture written information about an artwork), an Activation Report (to capture the work in action) and a Map of Interactions (to capture the network of relations within each performance), allowing the work to be realised (115).

Approaches to the preservation of creativity are often, in and of themselves, not intentionally creative, in that they do not produce anything new, but can sometimes serve only to further distance the process of creativity from its realisation in outputs. Yet increasingly, the literature presents creative conceptualisations of preservation practices and institutional formats for capturing cultural production in action. For example, Candelario (2018) discusses the concept of artist-driven archives for dance, where materials may still be in use by the individual or organisation that generated them. From this position, the collection retains a sense of flexibility where objects are interchanged and indeed may change (through wear or use, for example), rather than being preserved in a temporally static way. Candelario also notes the benefit of this approach to archiving creativity is the potential to capture creative processes as they are occurring, for example, in the development or rehearsal stages of a work (2018, 85). This sense of flexibility for institutional collections on creativity is explored in depth by Bode and De Laet (2021) whose research traces negotiations between artist Nkanga and the preservation of their performance art in The Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. Starting from the common position that pre-existing preservation systems not designed for performance art ‘end up taking the life out of the work’ (163), Nkanga seeks to develop what she calls a ‘breathing archive’ (167). In a similar way to Candelario’s artist-driven archive, here the aim is not to take works out of circulation when including them in an archive – to do so would deprive them of the ‘air that keeps them breathing’ (167). Instead, materials within collections can be ‘reproduced, recycled, readjusted or reworked’ as the artist deems necessary as part of the continued development of performance art (168).

The idea of artist-driven archives is found across art forms, noted in Jones’ attention to moving image archives, particularly regarding animation (2012). Jones (2012, 274–275) describes the idea of an archive of creative practice that ‘draws a direct line between the curated collection, the record of creative practice it contains and a new mission to nurture the ongoing creative practice of the future’. Exploring the International Animated Film Society (ASIFA) Hollywood Animation Archive in Burbank, CA and National Film Archive of India, Jones describes how the sectoral specificity and function of collections does not guarantee creativity but might be nurtured through innovative practice aimed at the continuation of creative practice for professional animators. The work of Jones (2012), Candelario (2018) and Bode and de Laet (2021) indicate recent developments in thinking around the needs and benefits of finding ways to transcend traditional preservation patterns, presenting cultural heritage through a more flexible and active conceptualisation.

(5)	Creative Heritage

The scholarship explored in the four previous categories reveals a range of ways in which creativity and/or creative practice are conceptualised and enacted across the GLAM sector. What is missing is the use of creativity as an integrated practice that intentionally produces something new – be that a creative work, or knowledge generation – that is allied to that heritage, rather than seeking to subsume it in the pursuit of claims to originality and the use of GLAM spaces as a simple stage or backdrop. ‘Creative heritage’ fills this gap, where practice is implemented in ways that do not seek to replicate, re-enact, or demonstrate, but to bring creativity into heritage practice in the full sense of the word: to produce distinct, integrated, and authentic outcomes. The concept and method of creative heritage was outlined by Istvandity (2021) in an article that reported on an Australian project – Trading Fours – integrating heritage work, artistic and archival practice. The project commissioned new jazz music compositions from Queensland-based artists who were provided recently recovered heritage material (recordings, photos, text, oral histories) relating to local jazz histories. The eight resulting compositions were recorded and performed by Queensland jazz musicians, providing an opportunity for music communities to both shape and access new ways of understanding a relatively obscured cultural past. Istvandity’s research positioned creative heritage as an emerging hybrid integration of heritage and creative practice, set apart from recreation or re-enactment practices for the way in which the method assists practitioners to create original works that stand alongside heritage collections and community knowledge. A key point that distinguishes ‘creative heritage’ practice from other categories is the involvement of relevant communities in cultural heritage projects, particularly in the production of creative practice elements. In such instances, communities are afforded creative agency, further reducing the colonial GLAM practice of ‘othering’.

The representation of diverse communities in GLAM collections is addressed across literature in this category. While lacking in the specific details of creative practice integration, Barnes and McPherson (2019) describe case studies of co-creating and co-producing museum content with diverse communities. With a focus on building better community relationships, the programme described includes a series of workshops where participants developed a creative product to be included within exhibitions in a museum setting. The outcomes include positive impacts for participants such as confidence, social skills and a sense of belonging; meanwhile the museum developed a more diverse visitor base as cultural communities came to view participants’ contributions. In another intervention using creativity and diverse communities, Wojtyńska et al. (2022) examine how creative practice in the form of artistic installation, creative writing, and dance when combined with linguistic elements could challenge the public discourse about migrant integration. As one of the few available publications regarding creativity in libraries, this study gave focus to themes of discrimination and exclusion based on language, with the preservation of Icelandic language closely guarded by locals. Using the creative performance and exhibition of works by foreign born artists, the event at Reykjavik City Library emphasised ‘diverse and occasionally conflicting emotions involved in the process of language learning as well as aesthetic aspects of Icelandic and embodied linguistic practices’ (2022, 126). The study is largely focussed on social and cultural aspects of language, though the use of creativity in the GLAM space to engage public audiences is significant.

In Australia, Tsilemanis’ (2020) three-year project sought to engage creativity within the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute to address a lack of diversity. Tsilemanis, as incoming curator, sought to use a range of creative elements including photography, film, music, theatre, and artistic installations in a range of project formats to revitalise the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute, using the concept of ‘creative activation’ to better engage with publics (2020, 2). New artistic materials produced through these curation processes then became fresh additions to the archive itself. This is another important point of difference for creative practice in Category 5: creative heritage methods are implemented with the intent of being archived, thereby becoming part of the preservation process and institutional repertoire. Tsilemanis documents the impacts of their work, including tensions within the institution, with economic and tourism-based outcomes benefiting the community. While not dealing specifically with Indigenous histories, the author takes a decolonising approach to recognising existing power dynamics within the institution. Such an approach has been shown already in the literature to have a strong connection between cultural heritage and creativity in collecting institutions. The edited collection by Harris, Barwick, and Troy (2022a) has just such a focus, foregrounding Indigenous Australian histories and cultural practices. In their own chapter (Harris, Barwick, and Troy 2022b), the authors outline the progress of a collaborative project between researchers and community members to ‘re-embody’ a Nigarigu song, through archival research, re-notation, and performance in an historically relevant location. Broadly, the chapter and indeed, the entire collection, queries the limits of the archive, and seeks alternative, and oftentimes creative ways for cultural heritage to be preserved, but also re-discovered in the present.

Discussion

A pertinent theme reiterated across the body of scholarship reviewed in this article is the resistance to typified and indeed circumscribed ideas of archives, exhibition, and preservation. Those ideas are replaced by a push towards a sense of flexibility and reimagining of such concepts in practice when considering the arts and creativity. In preserving and displaying creativity and creative practice in archival formats that push the boundaries of tradition such as the artist-driven archive, the focus is often more on the process of being creative, in both the past and the present, rather than on raw materials or finished products (see, for example, the Bebe Miller Company case study discussed in Candelario 2018) currently favoured by many GLAM institutions. Creativity, then, concerns form, function and content. That is, GLAM institutions, activities, conventions, personnel and communities are transformed in tandem with heritage meaning through creative practice and this is true, to varying degrees, across the five categories presented in this article. It is for this reason that creativity merits closer attention across all categories, for its disruptive, liberating qualities in enacting overt and covert calls for the GLAM sector to innovate around the temporal flexibility of heritage, and position their practices in ways that better consider the future uses of the cultural past they safeguard. The disruptive, liberating qualities of creative practice were illustrated in particular in those studies which engaged with decolonising GLAM institutions (Chipangura 2020, Conway 2018; Harris, Barwick, and Troy 2022b, Tsilemanis 2020) and those which focused on artist-driven collections (Bode and De Laet 2021, Candelario 2018; Jones 2012). Regarding the latter, these are imagined as ‘institutions in which catalogued artefacts in the collection are deliberately placed in a context of ongoing creative appropriation’ (Jones 2012, 280), and where taking accessibility ‘to the next level’ can assist in the ways whereby ‘existing work can be used to foster new work, and even generate change in practice’ (Jones 2012). While arguing for the move towards more flexible conceptualisations and practical activities within GLAM, we are not necessarily advocating artist-driven archives as the only way forward, but rather acknowledging the important work these ‘activist’ archives do in highlighting the use/s of archival material in the present and future. By the same token it is important to acknowledge that the enfolding of the archive as concept by a wider field of cultural production and theorisation, whether by humanities scholars (see Caswell 2016) or those in the art world (see Borggreen and Gade 2013) has been subject to some critique. Caswell (2016, 2), for instance, laments the lack of acquaintance with ‘actually existing archives’ and how attendant theory and praxis produced in the archive sector has been largely ignored by those with a mission to deconstruct, decolonise, queer or frame their creative practice as ‘archival’. Nonetheless, creativity commissioned from the archive (and libraries) might address the ‘failure of interdisciplinarity’ described by Caswell.

There are some core differences that emerge across the five categories, which can be described in terms of the intent of GLAM institutions in engaging with creativity and how the value of cultural heritage might be differently perceived by visitors. Category 1 ‘Demonstration’ captures the functional value of creative practice by showing how and perhaps why cultural activities might have played out. In doing so, demonstration-style activities have an intention to underscore the authenticity of cultural heritage for visitors. Interventions described in Category 2 ‘Programmed Performance’, on the other hand, often intend to present performative works adjacent to collections or exhibitions to illustrate artistic value, but do not necessarily embrace historically-authentic or heritage-based works. Narrative value is the focus of Category 3 ‘Historically-informed Creativity and Performance’, where heritage is drawn upon to create engaging stories and entertainment with an intention to educate visitors. Similar to Category 1, literature described in Category 4 ‘Institutional Preservation of Creativity’ draws on an intention to present collections as authentic but rather than articulating holdings through functional value, the emphasis is on the performance value of the creative practice. Category 5 ‘Creative Heritage’, like Category 2, has a common concern for the artistic value of creative practice but is primarily focused on heritage value, with integration and communication as the intention. We would caution that these differences concerning value and intent are preliminary, and we acknowledge again that this review cannot possibly capture the true range of creative practices within GLAM institutions worldwide.

We stress that the typology is not intended to be prescriptive, nor should it be considered as an exhaustive continuum or spectrum of practice. Rather we imagine characteristics of each category being present in complex GLAM projects with a focus on creativity. Returning to the example of the Madison flute which began our article, we asked ourselves how the Library of Congress might have extended its use by Lizzo to deepen creative engagement via all five categories. ‘Demonstration’ might have seen Lizzo use the Madison flute to play music composed in the early 1800s, the time at which the instrument was crafted and Madison was President. ‘Programmed Performance’ could see the Library of Congress include in future displays a recording of Lizzo playing the flute during their stadium concert, as well as the audiovisual materials recorded during their visit to the Main Reading Room and the Library’s Great Hall. The presentation of the recording could be enhanced by dance/movement, and live musical or theatrical additions. A version of ‘Historically-informed Creativity and Performance’ by Lizzo might involve a challenging reflection on the act of a person of colour playing music on an instrument gifted to a slave-owner. Such a scenario would pose questions about the ways in which music or even instruments are often viewed as cultural practices that transcend historical context. The ‘Institutional Preservation of Creativity’ in this context could include archiving audiovisual materials of the various instances of Lizzo’s use of the flute, and public reactions as captured in media publications, or such materials might feature in interactive exhibitions. In regard to Category 5, the flute’s creative heritage potential could have been maximised by the Library of Congress by (1) granting Lizzo access, not only to the institution’s flute collection, but to all materials held pertaining to Madison; (2) inviting Lizzo to compose a piece of music based on their engagement with those materials; (3) use the Madison flute to record the piece of music that draws on the Madison collection; (4) lodge the recording and all materials produced by Lizzo pertaining to its creation (e.g., sheet music, lyrics, etc.) in the Library’s collection. Through this one example, the subtleties between creative practice integration strategies, their values and intent, as outlined in our typology, gain further clarity. This example also highlights the multitude of ways for engaging creativity, where institutions could capitalise on this practice to maximise the integration of creative practice in GLAM spaces.

Conclusion

What has emerged in this article as a result of thinking about creativity in GLAM through a typological lens, is that the creation of new and original creative outputs drawing on collections is where the innovation in sector practice lies. Overall, then, we argue that the GLAM sector, in looking to the future, would benefit from a consideration of how generative practices captured by the category of ‘creative heritage’ have had and might have a place in their institutional strategies. Differentiated from re-enactment or recreationist processes, creative heritage is a practice of cultural memory-making befitting the work of GLAM’s memory institutions. As highlighted above, in its most essential form, a creative heritage approach seeks the synthesis of heritage- and creativity-based methodologies in producing new knowledge and art forms that sit alongside histories (Istvandity 2021), rather than demonstrating, reproducing or standing in for them as tends to be the case in the other categories of creative practice outlined in this article. The advantage of creative heritage for GLAM institutions is that this category of creative practice seeks to address the silence of archived materials by amplifying stories through artistic forms – music, dance, poetry, and so on – enriching them through interaction with the legacies of those histories in the present. Creative heritage activities in GLAM offer opportunities to create impact in meaning making and inclusion in work with communities whose heritage is celebrated in exhibitions or featured collections. This process of community involvement not only ensures that heritage stories more accurately represent cultural groups, but also reifies the significance of heritage in the present, providing an opportunity for the amendment of errors or gaps inscribed in collections in the past.

As such, we assert that the integration of creative heritage projects presents for GLAM institutions an opportunity to further enhance, and indeed meet their strategic priorities across common areas of growth in the sector, including diversifying communities, expanding and increasing collections, and maintaining relevance as distinctive physical sites in the face of challenges to compete for attention across virtual spaces and in addressing users as ‘audiences’ and ‘consumers’ as much as citizens. Creative heritage also provides an innovative response by GLAM institutions to the demands of policy makers in which the sector is increasingly expected to ‘perform’ to justify funding. Visitors seeking greater contribution and access to, and involvement in, the presentation of collections will also find creative heritage can fulfil a range of needs. We suggest that engagement with creative heritage must go beyond the programmatic, or one-off publicity-seeking events but should instead maximise the category’s ongoing capacity to innovate and maintain a future-focussed purview. The community element of creative heritage practice which sets it apart from other forms of creative engagement in GLAM fosters several areas of strategic importance at once. While many institutions involve communities in one or another, creative heritage sets the precedent that communities ought to be responsible for the way in which relevant cultural collections are interfaced with the present in creative ways. In doing so, cultural groups are instrumentally involved in heritage practice, and institutions will benefit from a stronger involvement from the communities they purport to serve. The involvement of communities can also fill gaps in the collection in potentially unexpected ways, through the peripheral gathering of community-held artefacts, knowledge and memory which can be usefully incorporated into collections via creative heritage. Both elements to community involvement can further enhance the diversity of visitors to institutions and provide targeted engagement opportunities.

Creative heritage, as defined in this article, invites the generation of new creative works, which in turn can offer visitors alternative and oftentimes, immersive ways of accessing collections, and making sense of the stories that institutional collections might tell, and similarly, may assist in diversifying and growing visitor numbers more broadly. Importantly, creative heritage both challenges the notion of traditional preservation practices that might ossify cultural heritage and brings to the fore a method for doing something about it. We argue that, following Istvandity’s original method for creative heritage (2021), resulting creative works that draw and sit alongside heritage and histories must themselves be preserved. Such an action secures for institutions that heritage should be viewed always as ‘becoming’ (Haldrup and Bærenholdt 2015), and for visitors, allows them to re-view cultural heritage as something not just belonging to the past, but that which can be activated in the present, providing fresh insights and meaning. For visitors then, the relevance of heritage collections may be unlocked, alongside fresh potential for a renewed attitude towards the value of cultural heritage. Understanding creative heritage as a process necessitates a negotiation for institutions as to how creative practice might best be preserved, as the literature in this review highlights, as an area for ongoing advancement. Indeed, creative heritage can take place through engagement with various genres, mediums and formats that best suit individual collections, remaining responsive to community and institutional needs, abilities, and opportunities. Heritage futures are indeed creative futures.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Istvandity

Lauren Istvandity is a transdisciplinary researcher working across areas of music, cultural heritage, wellbeing and memory studies, and is a theme leader in the Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre, at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Dr Istvandity works with diverse communities, artists, and the heritage sector to produce new knowledge and innovative scholarly and creative outcomes. She is the author of The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music and Autobiographical Memory (2019, Equinox), and co-author of Regurgitator’s Unit (2022, Bloomsbury), and Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum (2019, Bloomsbury).

Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker, PhD, is a Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Australia. Sarah has published extensively in the fields of critical heritage, museum and archival studies, with her most recent research exploring cultural justice as a methodological and conceptual framework. She is Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council project ‘Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area’ (2021–2024). Her recent books include Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage (Routledge, 2018), Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Justice and the Deindustrialsing City (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Paul Long

Paul Long is Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre. He has published widely on issues in popular cultural history, participation, and creative work. He co-founded the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University in 2009 and is founding co-editor of the Journal of Beatles Studies (Liverpool University Press). He is currently researching the role of migrants in the creative and cultural industries as well as Australian home-made, amateur, and DIY creative production.